14 THE P.IRTir AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 



Nearly 600 years had passed between Hippocrates and 

 Galen, and when we compare the two it must be remem- 

 bered that Galen had the advantage of that 600 years of 

 medical experience. It gave him a wider outlook and 

 thus made him the better physician, though I conceive 

 Hippocrates, considering his times, to have been the 

 bigger man. I do not propose to dwell on Galen's 

 eminence as a physician, though he stood far above all 

 others of his age. His real claim to immortality may be 

 put into a few words : he was the first to make systematic 

 use of the experimental method in medicine, and he 

 founded the science of physiology. He probably owed 

 more to his studies in Alexandria than to his native 

 school of Pergamum, for there he had the opportunities 

 for human dissection which were denied to him later in 

 Rome, and there, too, he must have gained his first 

 insight into the possibilities of the experimental method. 

 To us it seems a marvel that a man of Galen's ability, 

 an adept in the methods which we know he used, should 

 have failed to apprehend the circulation of the blood, for 

 he came very near it. History is full of instances in 

 which erroneous assumptions, so firmly held that their 

 truth is never called in question, blind men to a truth 

 which would otherwise be obvious. It was so with Galen, 

 and, did we know it, it is probably true of ourselves. 

 Nevertheless his experimental discoveries in other regions 

 of physiology, and particularly in the domain of the 

 nervous system, entitle him to be called the father of 

 that science. Galen must also be credited with a great 

 advance in pathology. The earlier Greeks had regarded 

 internal medicine from a purely humoral aspect : the later 

 Greeks began to recognise affections of certain definite 

 organs, but Galen developed this conception beyond any 

 of his predecessors. His latest treatise, ' De locis affectis,' 

 deals with the morbid conditions of the different organs 

 as judged from the symptoms of the patient. Dr. Payne 

 has justly remarked that, had Galen been able to make 

 post-mortem examinations, he might have founded morbid 



